One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

[Following up
Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the
invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.

In May 1876, New
York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and
Democratic politician Roger
A. Pryor to deliver its annual
Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was
most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the
choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and
poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening
Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and
reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the
contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that
immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different
perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial
results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation
were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.

Yet the remarks
that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately
described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile
his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes
and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an
impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause
of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of
Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial,
he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues
throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his
Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue
at length in
my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly
supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as
Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion
Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very
successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole
to this pro-Southern standpoint.

In my book’s
analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a
first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s
Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the
Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of
reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects
(which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as
Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and
contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in
any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ
dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so
bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance,
of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they
did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a
combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and
remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

[Following up
Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On one of the
great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective
memories.

In a long-ago
guest post on Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s Atlantic blog, Civil War
historian Andy Hall highlighted
Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at
that first hyperlink). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery,
then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short
but incredibly (if
not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of
the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph
here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink
above), and I’ll see you in a few.

Welcome back! If
I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended
attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final
point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here
to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We
must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is
particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that
would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between
the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on
all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be
no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them,
but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not
to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on
the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that
position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been
impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.

If we were to
better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and
important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War
that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most
frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides,
as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as
Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual
bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and
significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that
the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe
Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead
through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained
unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain
so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick
Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.

Monday, May 29, 2017

[This special post is the first of a series inspired by the
history behind Memorial Day. Check out my similar
2012 and 2014
series for more!]

On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we
should.

In a long-ago post
on the Statue of Liberty, I made a case for remembering, and engaging much
more fully, with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French
abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and abolitionism
in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the
memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried there,
hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has come
to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for
generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those
meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its
radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are
beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and
meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to
our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and
abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those
who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?

I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the
last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has
meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and
celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed
forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that
idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve
analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be
a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers
won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that
the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the quarter
of a million American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for
another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and
don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of
service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love
them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses
can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly includes a strident critique of the
Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen in lines like “To those who threw you
away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s
range of emotions and responses to the death of a young soldier in that war.

Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and
narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of
complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known
as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars
like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in
Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on
May 1st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very
sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the
lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to many other
communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less potentially
divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and division and the
ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on, perspectives of former
soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s veterans from both sides.
Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in their own way, as evidenced
by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman
the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of ex-slaves
leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the cemetery where
he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel to the family
memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful reminder that
the American family extends to blood relations of very different and perhaps
even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave memorials
represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant American
stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were a
continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways
in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.

Again, I’m not
trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day are
anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard
some eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow
soldiers had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and
hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those
perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national
histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more
telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can
remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our
celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be.

#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: